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A Word on Today’s Supreme Court Decision

A Word on Today’s Supreme Court Decision

Last updated on: July 1, 2024 at 10:37 pm by Mary Pezzulo

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A Word on Today’s Supreme Court Decision 2024-07-01T22:37:30-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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The U. S. Supreme Court building under a bright blue sky

image via Pixabay

I wanted to say a few words about today’s Supreme Court decision.

Today, the Supreme Court ruled effectively letting the president get away with crimes– in a carefully worded way, so that only presidents whom the courts wish to get away with crimes can get away with crimes. It dovetails nicely with their ruling last week, that courts are the ones who can decide what government agencies are allowed to do. In one way, this decision turns the president into a despot. In another, it makes unelected justices the most powerful people in a system of government that’s supposed to be characterized by checks and balances.

I want to make sure everyone understands that this is what today’s conservatives wanted all along.

Not everyone who calls themself a conservative thinks this way. I was a conservative for awhile myself. I mean, this particular movement, one born out of anger at The New Deal. The one that made Democrats switch platforms in reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. The one that bullies Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, by claiming we’re traitors and in sin if we don’t vote for them and them alone. Those people. What they wanted all along, was to undermine the rule of law so that rich and powerful people can do whatever they want. And they wanted the president, as long as he was THEIR president, to have a blank check to do whatever they wanted him to do. And for now, they’ve won.

They were never really concerned with saving unborn babies, and that shows in the results of their actions. Abortions have increased since Trump became president and continued to spike after Dobbs. We now know that for fact now. Abortion rates peaked in the 90s and then began to decline, a bit faster under Democratic administrations than under Republicans, and with a very small uptick during the Bush administration that went back down the next year. They began to rise precipitously after Trump became president. More babies have been killed every single year since 2017. The Dobbs Decision hasn’t decreased their number; we’re at our highest rate since the Obama administration now.

It’s easy to see why that would be the case. Abortion is one of those things that doesn’t magically go away if it’s harder to get legally. But it IS one of those things that can happen more often if people feel trapped. No one wants to start a family when the country is unstable and run by a malignant narcissist who treats the position of the presidency like his reality television show. No one feels safe to settle down when that man is still claiming he won the election and he’s going to run again. No one wants to be pregnant in a country where the news is full of stories of women unable to get miscarriage treatment because the hospital is afraid to get sued. Of course you’re more likely to take that pill in the first trimester when it’s legal, or go out of state to get an abortion, if that’s what’s happening all around. If the world were different, you might choose differently. If you felt that the world was getting better, you might like to bring children into it. If you knew that, if the unthinkable happened and you hemorrhaged or got sepsis at twenty weeks, you could get the care you needed, you’d be more likely not to get an abortion at six weeks.

The pro-life movement, and the politicians who manipulated them, got everything they wanted, and the direct result is more dead unborn babies.

The only good thing about living through this crisis is, now we know we’ve been duped.

If you voted for Trump because you’re pro-life, you were duped. You were used. Your compassion was manipulated to make it easier for the richest and most powerful to do whatever they want. I didn’t vote for Trump, not once, but I’ve had my compassion manipulated by the pro-life movement into voting for candidates I couldn’t stand before. Everyone who called themselves pro-life has been taken in. They used us to create the world they wanted, and it’s not a pro-life world. It’s time for this to stop. It’s time to get angry.

You can still choose to start repairing the damage.

That’s all I have to say right now.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

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